If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

Announce: Spotify Premium Plugin

Please note this plugin is not endorsed or supported by Spotify or Logitech. If you want a supported solution for playback of Spotify streams using Logitech devices please use the official Logitech support which is available for Squeezebox Touch and Radio.

Edit: Updated with Release status - Release 2.2.5 is now available from the Recommended 3rd Party Plugin list

Scope:
- for Spotify users with a Premium account
- plays back 320k or 160k streams
- requires a PC based server running Squeezebox server (linux, windows or mac), or linux based intel or arm based NAS (support not guarenteed)
- will play back via Squeezebox 2 and later hardware players, SoftSqueeze and SqueezePlay
- supports a single playback session at one time which may be synchronised across multiple players (i.e. does not support multiple differently playback sessions at one time - this is a Spotify limitation)

If you are a Spotify Premium subscriber, then to try it out:

1) Make sure you are running 7.5.x or 7.6.x Squeezebox server, or 7.7.x LMS
2) (no longer necessary)
3) Select the "3rd party Spotify Plugin" from the recommended 3rd party plugin list and then click apply as per normal plugin installation
4) Ensure the server has restarted
4a) If your server machine has a firewall, ensure that the application "spotifyd.exe" or "spoitfyd" is allowed to receive incomming connections.
5) Go to the Plugin, Settings page for "Spotify" either via the advanced menu or from the plugin page
6) Read and agree the Spotify restrictions, then add your username and password to the settings page.
7) If you refresh the settings page a couple of times you should see that a "helper app" is running and it is logged into Spotify. If not there may be an error to help...
9) Go to the "radio" menu (7.5) or "my apps" (7.6+) on one of your hardware players and you should be able to browse and play tracks from Spotify....

Please provide feedback and let me know if this plugin is interesting to people on this thread

Update:
Arm based NAS users should now be able to use the standard version - link to older 2.0.4 version removed.

Please provide feedback and let me know if this plugin is interesting to people...

Well, it's the biggest enhancement to my Squeezebox experience for a very long time, so it's definitely VERY interesting to me. It's worth every dollar I had to spent on the Spotify Premium account to make it work. This is one of those plugins that's totally going to change how I find new music and listen to it. Really great work with this, thanks for all your efforts.

Just for convenience, I'll mention the issues you have already got via mail earlier which haven't been solved yet, just to avoid duplicate reports from other users and make it possible for other beta testers to comment on them. There isn't anything in this list which you haven't already seen.

The web interface:
============
2.
It would be nice to get album art in search results, at least in album lists, is that possible ? It works on SqueezePlay but not in web interface.

3.
It would be nice with a "Play" button beside albums in search result, should the the same as the "All songs" item in the sub menu, possibly an "add" button might be nice too.

4.
Would it be possible to add functionality so you can build a Spotify playlist and save it to spotify ?

5.
If possible, I would prefer that search results was rendered the same way as in standard library. So album lists shows the album and artist as separate clickable links and track lists shows the track, album and artist as separate clickable links. This would make it really easy to switch between the different search types, for example start by searching for a known track and then click on the artist list of one of the matches to list all albums for that artist.

6.
It would be nice with a "Play" button beside a playlist in search result, should the the same as the "All songs" item in the sub menu, possibly an "add" button might be nice too.

7.
Similar to point 5 it would also be nice if I could see artist and album information in current playlist for each track, currently it only displays the track title and album cover.

8.
After adding a track as a favorite it looks a bit strange in when expanding "Favorites" menu in default skin, it looks ok in classic skin. I suspect it might have to do with a missing icon or something similar. The "Spotify" entry in the screenshot is the DSBridge connection, it's the "Love Doesn't Ask Why" entry that's the one connected to your plugin. Here is the screenshot: http://erland.isaksson.info/arkiv/sl...fyFavorite.png

SqueezePlay interface:
===============
10.
Would it be possible to add a "Similar artists on Spotify" item in the context menu on all artists (local and spotify) that listed the "Similar Artists" from spotify ? That way it would more user friendly to find similar music as the one you already have in the local library without having to revert to searching that needs you to enter text. Enter text works good on touch interface but not so good on Radio, Boom, Controller and Touch IR-remote interface.

11.
Would it be possible to add a "Albums on Spotify" item in the context menu on all artists (local and spotify) that listed albums for the specified artist from spotify ? That way it would more user friendly to find new music from artists you already have in the local library without having to revert to searching that needs you to enter text.

12.
Is it possible to control the rendering of album lists ? It would be nice if albums where shown on multiple lines in same way as My Music/Albums menu lists albums

13.
Is it possible to control the rendering of track lists ? It would be nice if tracks where shown on multiple lines in same way as current playlist lists tracks

14.
To make searching a bit better, it would be nice if it remembered the last 20 search texts I've used so I could reuse them without having to enter all the letters manually again.

15.
In addition to point 14, maybe it could even remember which Spotify artists/albums you have listen to before and the ones in your Spotify playlsits and make it possible to browse among those by Albums or by Artists/Albums ?

Other things:
========
16.
It doesn't work with synchronized players or multiple players by design, so if any user have problem with that, it's a limitation of the Spotify API as I've understood it. It might be a good idea to give a better error/warning message if someone tries to use multiple players.

iPeng interface
==================
19.
In iPeng the Spotify icon in the "Radio" menu isn't shown, it just shows the default radio icon.

20.
In the "What's new" menu I have some problem in iPeng if it's only a single track. It works for multiple tracks but for entries that only have a single track I just get the heading and not the clickable track itself. The heading contains the track title but I cannot click on the heading to play it. After some time I realized I can hit "Play Shuffle" at the top to play the track.

21.
Album lists doesn't show the album cover in iPeng. It works perfectly on the Controller though, it shows the album list text entries first and after a second the album covers are shown.

Announce: Spotify Premium Plugin (Beta)

>This is one of those plugins that's totally going to change how I
>find new music and listen to it.
>
I use Spotify to try some music for a new band that I have heard of somewhere else, but don't use it to discover new artists/albums. i.e. I find it good for when I know what I am looking for.

Whilst it's undoubtedly a great new way to listen to music, what features does it provide to enable you to discover different music to listen to?

I think the following are possible ways to discover new music with Spotify - which of these are possible with the plugin that are changing how you discover new music?:

1. Play Spotify Radio based on selected genres and decades.
I don't use this in Spotify, because the genres are not specific enough, and playlist is too random. There are plenty of other plugins that provide similar functionality (eg. lastFM), providing more control and have more obscure artists in their DB.

2. Navigate to an artist and find similar artists.

3. Navigate to an artist and play artist radio (plays a mix of similar artists).

4. Browse Spotify "What's new" music.
The music is often not new music, but music recently added to Spotify's library. There's not many to choose from, and they come up randomised.

5. Browse Spotify "Top Albums" and "Top Tracks" music.
The list always has the same top pop acts listed, which aren't very interesting to me.

I haven't tried the plugin because I haven't got a premium account yet, but might try it some time.

>This is one of those plugins that's totally going to change how I
>find new music and listen to it.
>
I use Spotify to try some music for a new band that I have heard of somewhere else, but don't use it to discover new artists/albums. i.e. I find it good for when I know what I am looking for.

Since this is pretty new, I haven't used Spotify much yet, I got my premium account last week when I got the beta from Triode. The main advantage as I see it is that I can listen to something directly on my main music listening system to see if I like it, without Spotify I have to use illegal methods to download music files or preview the 30 first seconds with bad audio quality through laptop speakers.

I think "Similar Artists" has most potential to actually find completely new music and possibly also "What's New" and the "Top Artists/Albums/Tracks" functionality.

I think it's going to reach is true potential when it's somewhat more integrated with my main music library, so I can select similar artists from Spotify to one of the artists I already have in my local library. Possibly an integration with LastFM similar artists functionality might also make sense, I'm not sure how good the Spotify similar artists functionality are yet.

The Spotify plugin currently don't have a year or genre browse method, but if that's possible it would be a great enhancement if the genre information is good enough. Currently the plugin supports "Whats New", "Top xxx" and search for Albums, Artists and Tracks.

I think US and possibly also UK users somtimes forget that LastFM streaming and Pandora streaming where similar functionality already is available isn't supported in all countries, for example not where I live.

Comenting back on the use case - the killer feature for me is the 320k streams. I've played with Napster in the uk and its good for causal listening of many artists, but I didn't find I could listen at length on a hifi to those streams (128k wma when I tried). 320k streams is a whole different level to me and it makes it a reasonable case for a spotify premium subscription.

So my target use case was to stream high quality streams via a transporter, external dac and tube based hifi (triodes!) - this is what motivated me to write the plugin...

I will be working through the plugin UI enhancements suggested by Erland and others over the next couple of weeks - would we grateful of any other feedback.

Announce: Spotify Premium Plugin (Beta)

>I know you mention in the first post that this works with Spotiy
>premium - can I double check it doesn't work with Spotify unlimited?
>
I'd like to know that too. Spotify Premium is a whopping ú10 a month, whereas Spotify Unlimited is ú5.

I predominantly listen to local music, rather than internet streaming, but if the Squeezebox UI were to provide new ways of discovering new music through Spotify, then I may be tempted with Unlimited.

>I know you mention in the first post that this works with Spotiy
>premium - can I double check it doesn't work with Spotify unlimited?
>
I'd like to know that too. Spotify Premium is a whopping ú10 a month, whereas Spotify Unlimited is ú5.

I predominantly listen to local music, rather than internet streaming, but if the Squeezebox UI were to provide new ways of discovering new music through Spotify, then I may be tempted with Unlimited.

I'm not 100% sure but since it says that mobile applications only are supported with premium account, I suspect premium is required to use the API and thus to use this plugin.

If someone have Unlimited it should be easy to try and let us know for sure.